"A seperate peace" by John Knowles

Gliederung

• John Knowles: The author and his times
• The plot
• Gene Forrester
• Phineas (Finny)
• Elwin "Leper" Lepellier
• Brinker Hadley
• Setting
• Themes
• Friendship
• Conformity
• Truth and falsehood
• Growing up
• Style
• Point of view
• Form and structure
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13

John Knowles: The author and his times

John Knowles was only 33 years old when A Separate Peace was published, in 1959, in England (see The Critics section at the end of this book for a good idea of how popular the book was there) and then, in 1960, in the United States. The book was an immediate and stunning success, receiving the William Faulkner Foundation Award and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

But John Knowles had begun writing seriously a decade before the success of A Separate Peace enabled him to abandon full-time employment. He was assistant editor for the Yale Alumni Magazine where he'd attended college, he worked as a reporter and drama critic for the Hartford Courant, and then he wrote his first novel, Descent into Proselito, while living in Italy and France. That novel was never published; his friend and teacher, the playwright Thornton Wilder, felt it was not good enough.

Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, on September 16, 1926, the third of four children. At age fifteen, during World War II, he went away to boarding school, the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The pressures of this environment at such a dire and impressionable time laid the foundation for A Separate Peace - and, even before that novel, for a short story called "Phineas," which takes us through the events of the first half of the novel.

Like so many writers before and since, John Knowles found his way to New York City, renting an apartment in the Hell's Kitchen area of the West Side, where he applied himself rigorously to his craft in the mid-1950s. Determined to make a name for himself, he busily turned out drama reviews, short stories, and freelance articles. A story about Phillips Exeter Academy published in Holiday magazine received wide acclaim, and Knowles moved to Philadelphia to work for the magazine from 1957 to 1960.

Once again he was able to travel abroad, and he tied two more books directly into his life experience, a travelogue called American

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